Tag Archives: Indigenous History

Jean Baptiste Assiginack: The Starling aka Blackbird

      1 Comment on Jean Baptiste Assiginack: The Starling aka Blackbird

By Alan Corbiere This post marks the third in a series of essays – posted the second Wednesday of each month – by Alan Corbiere focusing on Anishinaabeg participation in the War of 1812.  On the morning of October 5, 1861, 96 year old Odaawaa Chief Jean Baptiste Assiginack of the Biipiigwenh (Sparrowhawk) clan rose from his slumber and got… Read more »

Mookomaanish: The Damn Knife (Odaawaa Chief and Warrior)

By Alan Corbiere This post marks the second in a series of essays – posted the second Wednesday of each month – by Alan Corbiere focusing on Anishinaabeg participation in the War of 1812.  At the commencement of the War of 1812, the British were not totally certain that the Western Confederacy (including the Anishinaabeg: Ojibwe, Odaawaa and Potowatomi) would… Read more »

Anishnaabeg in the War of 1812: More than Tecumseh and his Indians

By Alan Corbiere This post marks the first in a series of essays – posted the second Wednesday of each month – by Alan Corbiere focusing on Anishinaabeg participation in the War of 1812. A modified version of these posts originally appeared in the July 2012 edition of the Ojibway Cultural Foundation newsletter. It is well known that the Anishinaabeg… Read more »

History Education in Canada without Historical Thinking? A worrisome prospect

By Heather E. McGregor Recently Peter Seixas announced that the Historical Thinking Project (the Project) was denied ongoing funding by the Department of Canadian Heritage. This change was said to be because the purposes of the Project do not coincide with, as quoted from The Canada History Fund, “projects that celebrate key milestones and people who have helped shape our… Read more »

An Unsettling Prairie History: A Review of James Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains

By Kevin Plummer “Those Reserve Indians are in a deplorable state of destitution, they receive from the Indian Department just enough food to keep soul and body together, they are all but naked, many of them barefooted,” Lawrence Clarke wrote in 1880 of near-starvation Cree around Fort Carlton. “Should sickness break out among them in their present weakly state,” the… Read more »

Indigenous History in the Classroom: Four Principles, Four Questions

By Carolyn Podruchny  Is teaching Indigenous history any different than teaching other histories? This question was posed to organizers of a day-long Teaching History Symposium on history, heritage, and education for Toronto area public school teachers, heritage experts, graduate students, and faculty members in the History Department at York University.[1] Rather than providing an answer, I suggest more questions to… Read more »

Reuben Gold Thwaites and The Jesuit Relations: 100 Years

      1 Comment on Reuben Gold Thwaites and The Jesuit Relations: 100 Years

By Kathryn Magee Labelle Reuben Gold Thwaites died in 1913, the same year of the final publication of his seventy-two volume The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791. One hundred years later they are still a valuable and widely circulated edited collection. These transcribed reports and letters from French Jesuit… Read more »

The life and times of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 in British Columbia

By Neil Vallance and Hamar Foster [The Royal Proclamation’s] force as a statute is analogous to the status of Magna Carta which has always been considered to be the law throughout the Empire.  It was a law which followed the flag as England assumed jurisdiction over newly-discovered or acquired lands or territories.  It follows, therefore, that the Colonial Laws Validity… Read more »

Reflections on 1763 in Far Northern Ontario

      No Comments on Reflections on 1763 in Far Northern Ontario

By John S. Long The tensions in the Royal Proclamation have ebbed and flowed over the past 250 years and, of course, are still with us today. The treaty relationships that unite First Peoples with other Canadians are inherently problematic, due to our differing understandings (or perhaps outright ignorance) of history. Notwithstanding the Proclamation, and the gubernatorial proclamations that reinforced… Read more »

Parchment, Wampum, Letters and Symbols: Expanding the parameters of the Royal Proclamation commemoration

By Alan Ojiig Corbiere, Bne Doodeman, Mchigiing Njibaa This year marks the 250th Anniversary of the Royal Proclamation, but for some reason it does not mark the 250th Anniversary of the action taken by Odaawaa Chief Pontiac and others.  A piece of paper signed by King George III receives more attention than the actions of this chief and his colleagues. … Read more »